


i'll keep in a cave, your comfort and all (unburdened and becoming)

by juulies (nnegan13)



Category: Alex Stern - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: F/M, speculation fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:02:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25298065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nnegan13/pseuds/juulies
Summary: “Do you even need a Virgil anymore?”She snorted. “You’re the one who’s actually readDante’s Inferno, you tell me. Plus, I figured we were more like Eurydice and Orpheus, now.”“I mean, did you die? I didn’t die.”“We’ve both died. More than once.”“Yeah, but not while coming out of Hell.” He sipped his tea again. “We’re not Eurydice and Orpheus.”She crossed her arms over her chest, the ink of her tattoos rippling. For a moment, he couldn’t look away and she was Mab again, cloaked in black and sparkling with the stars in the sky. The amount of times he’d seen that vision over the months meant it was etched onto the backs of his eyelids. Given enough time and resources, he could paint a thousand portraits of Alex as Mab and still not get her out of his system. Not that he wanted to, but…
Relationships: Darlington/Alex Stern
Comments: 2
Kudos: 58





	i'll keep in a cave, your comfort and all (unburdened and becoming)

**Author's Note:**

> title from 8(circle) by Bon Iver 
> 
> ms bardugo u owe me reparations for sticking an author's interview at the end of your audiobook and making me think that they were gonna save darlington before the book ended 
> 
> anyways. speculative. possibly OOC but like, if you spent months in hell or getting hunted down trying to get someone out of hell are u really gonna b urself when u come out the other side? also I am not as smart or knowledgeable as darlington or Alex on any field of smarts so like, soz 
> 
> unbetaed we die like men

“Sandow barred you from Black Elm,” Alex said, handing him a mug full of tea he watched her prepare for him in the kitchen of Il Bastone. Darlington imagined she would be huddled under a blanket sitting at the counter same as him if Dawes wasn’t passed out upstairs in Dante’s bedroom. But Dawes _was_ passed out upstairs and his hands wouldn’t stop shaking, so Alex was the one to put the kettle on and scavenge around the cupboards to find wherever Pammy kept the teabags and make a pot full for the two of them to stew over once it was ready.

She cut lemons into meticulous circles as it boiled and steeped and Darlington watched the way the stringy muscles of her forearms rolled under her tattoos as she worked.

The lip of the mug was cool when he put his mouth on it, the heat of the tea not yet sunk into it, and he relished the soft, creamy curve of it so long that Alex shot him a “what the fuck, Darlington?” look when he held it without drinking. He took an incautious sip and rotated the mug when he set it down so the next time he lifted it up, the porcelain would be blessedly cool again. Alex raised an eyebrow as the tea slipped scalding down his throat, but he didn’t feel it. Heat was a way of life as a demon, like the ever present thrum of hot flashes in the summer when his human body would try for temperature regulation and never succeed. One hot wave after another, scalp to toe-tip. No relief.

“That’s shit,” he murmured, poking the mug’s handle just a little farther around its circumference. Alex’s laugh was choked and incredulous and reverberated through him like a sound wave through a bell, echoing over and over. He liked her incredulity, when he managed to surprise her with something about _him_ rather than the occult. For as long as he’d known her she’d grasped the type of person he was as easily a baby held a binky. Every chance he got to disrupt that, especially when she smiled afterward like she preferred this surprising Darlington to whoever she was expecting, was a tally mark on some chart tucked away at the back of his brain.

He didn’t know what the chart was for or why it was there, but he kept marking those laughs down.

If he dated them as he did for his usual pattern analysis, there’d be a big blank time span from the middle of last December to now, to this fresh mark.

(Technically it wouldn’t be _blank_ , just—unverified; pencil tallies, ready to be erased when he was notified of their irrelevance. He’d seen _everything_ since the Hell beast swallowed him and he surfaced from the brimstone lake of his baptism into the world of demons, every single fucking thing that happened to Alex until she’d pulled him out of Hell. She was his anchor point, the one thing that could pull him back to humanity; of course he saw everything. And when she thought of him, or he thought she thought of him, there would be a prickling at the base of his neck. When that turned particularly amused like he remembered her laugh to be, he’d make a pencil tally mark.

Once everything was sorted, he scrape together _some_ ritual to see exactly how many of those tally marks could be inked permanently and which he would be forced to concede.)

Alex blew on the surface of her tea and said, “Dawes and I have been looking into counter spells on the side of everything, but it’s mostly been on the back burner.”

“Understandable.” The corner of her mouth turned up.

“Now that your back, feel free to offer your expertise.” He folded his trembling hands together, watched her closely as she drank. “You know, among all the other shit you need to do for me.”

It was his turn to laugh now as she dunked a lemon slice into her cup. In a few minutes when the lemon was nice and saturated and the rind started turning mushy, she’d pull it out and suck on it until it was shriveled like a raisin. He’d seen her do it hundreds of times. It was comforting to think about, the face she’d make when the sourness hit her tastebuds. 

Something normal. Typical. Reliable.

“How much more teaching do you need?” He asked. “You’ve handled being Dante solo far longer than you have being Dante with a Virgil. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for your regression.”

“Is ‘handled’ code for ‘barely managed without dying’?”

He ignored her. “Not to mention you killed a far more powerful wheelhouse than yourself—”

“Please, don’t hold back.”

“—uncovered a super dangerous drug peddling scheme, defeated a hell beast, and saved me from Hell.” He ticked each accomplishment off on his fingers then held his hand up and wiggled them at her. “Do you even need a Virgil anymore?”

She snorted. “You’re the one who’s actually read _Dante’s Inferno_ , you tell me. Plus, I figured we were more like Eurydice and Orpheus, now.”

“I mean, did you die? I didn’t die.”

“We’ve both died. More than once.”

“Yeah, but not while coming out of Hell.” He sipped his tea again. “We’re not Eurydice and Orpheus.”

She crossed her arms over her chest, the ink of her tattoos rippling. For a moment, he couldn’t look away and she was Mab again, cloaked in black and sparkling with the stars in the sky. The amount of times he’d seen that vision over the months meant it was etched onto the backs of his eyelids. Given enough time and resources, he could paint a thousand portraits of Alex as Mab and still not get her out of his system. Not that he wanted to, but…

“Is this some kind of shitty dude thing? You’re pissed that _you’re_ the woman instead of the man?”

Frowning, he said, “What? No.”

“Then what is it?”

His mouth moved faster than his mind did, he couldn’t stop himself if he tried. “They were in love, that’s why Orpheus went back and back for her.”

She was silent. The surface of his tea was amber gold, one of the lights in the kitchen ceiling reflected in it, along with a few curls of his hair and a patch of his forehead. For minutes, the only sound was the hum of the refrigerator, the kick of the air-conditioner as it turned off, the pulse of the lights. He wanted to be back in Hell, the night some demon threatened to sew his mouth shut and then followed through hours later when he slept and thought he was safe. With his thumbnail, he dug a deep divot into his lip, remembering the coarse threads there, how his lips were chapped for weeks after he burned the stitches out. No—he chanced a glance at Alex, staring at the countertop—this was awkward, but he would rather be here than anywhere in that godforsaken place again. A hundred times over he would be here, making things tense and uncomfortable, but seeing her in the flesh rather than as a fragment, a vision, a mirage he thought marked him as crazy as well as damned.

They weren’t Eurydice and Orpheus because _he_ should be Orpheus given how his heart—

No. He couldn’t go there, not yet.

Besides, it would never pan out that way. He was saved, not her; she sung songs that made people—Grays, but still—flock to her; he got bitten by the snake, to put it lightly. And no one looked back at the other as they ascended, and no one died. The end, myth unfulfilled, case closed.

Eventually, she started moving around the kitchen again, plucking the lemon slice out of her mug, sucking on it as she packaged the others away in a Tupperware and disappeared them into the fridge, finishing her tea, then his when he didn’t move further, rinsing their mugs out, and exiting the room.

He couldn’t find her when he bullied himself to go searching for her. There was a hollow feeling in his chest he didn’t like as he looked at empty room after empty room, rubbing at his sternum as he went, like if he generated enough friction some scientific bullshit would happen in his ribcage and he would feel full again.

Darlington wound up in Virgil’s rooms and stripped down to his boxers before sliding into bed, ignoring the thoughts and images rattling around in his skull. Tomorrow he would track her down, apologize, let her talk her way through the last months even though he’d seen it all, let her pick the music the house played as they studied and researched. Tomorrow he would start the long, long process of fixing it all.

Just before sleep sunk its claws into his mind, the door cracked open and a sliver of light fell across the bedroom floor.

“Danny?”

He tried to speak with her once while he was in Hell, but the incantation messed with his brain and turned everything upside down. He couldn’t tell left from right or which body parts that his eyes were comprehending were his, and his attempts at communicating were lackluster to say the least. The one thing he did manage to convey was that his grandfather called him Danny, and he just wanted someone to call him that one more time, _Alex_ please, _before it’s all gone, before I’m—I need you to—_

Heat rose all over his body. “Alex?”

The door shut. Quiet, padded footfalls reached his ears, then the sound of a zipper and fabric hitting the floor. Then Alex was slipping into his bed, her legs bare, the hem of her t-shirt barely covering her underwear. It took her a moment to settle, shifting one way, then the next, ignoring his questioning noises and mumbles until she was finally still and pressed all the way into his front, the medial curve to his lateral in their makeshift quotation mark. In the dark, accompanied only by their slow breathing, she pulled his hand until his arm was over her waist, then slipped them under her shirt until the tips of his index, middle, and ring fingers pressed into her breast bone.

Again, he said, “Alex?”

“This is how we do it, right?” Her voice was sleep soft, raspy, and her body warm in a pleasant way, so unlike the heat of Hell and very much like the night after last Halloween when he’d recognized the glint of power shimmered over her skin and wanted to serve there, forever. Darlington let himself relax, and so did Alex, and she sighed when he pressed his mouth into the back of her neck and stayed there.

**Author's Note:**

> xx


End file.
